The Picture of Dorian Grey

by Oscar Wilde

"I want the Dorian Gray I used to paint," said the artist sadly.

I cannot repeat an emotion. No one can, except sentimentalists.

Even now I cannot help feeling that it is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really shown in the work one creates.

It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him.

Whatever I have done that is good, I owe to you.

Perhaps one should never put one's worship into words."

There seemed to him to be something tragic in a friendship so coloured by romance.

The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable.

And, indeed, the whole book seemed to him to contain the story of his own life, written before he had lived it.

wondering sometimes which were the more horrible, the signs of sin or the signs of age.

But he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual development by any formal acceptance of creed or system, or of mistaking, for a house in which to live, an inn that is but suitable for the sojourn of a night, or for a few hours of a night in which there are no stars and the moon is in travail.

How exquisite life had once been! How gorgeous in its pomp and decoration! Even to read of the luxury of the dead was wonderful.

Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.

There were times when it appeared to Dorian Gray that the whole of history was merely the record of his own life, not as he had lived it in act and circumstance, but as his imagination had created it for him, as it had been in his brain and in his passions. He felt that he had known them all, those strange terrible figures that had passed across the stage of the world and made sin so marvellous and evil so full of subtlety. It seemed to him that in some mysterious way their lives had been his own.

Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book. There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.

Nothing is serious nowadays. At least nothing should be."

Why is your friendship so fatal to young men?

The middle classes air their moral prejudices over their gross dinner-tables, and whisper about what they call the profligacies of their betters in order to try and pretend that they are in smart society and on intimate terms with the people they slander.

He felt a terrible joy at the thought that some one else was to share his secret, and that the man who had painted the portrait that was the origin of all his shame was to be burdened for the rest of his life with the hideous memory of what he had done.

"You are mad, Dorian." "Ah! I was waiting for you to call me Dorian."

They get up early, because they have so much to do, and go to bed early, because they have so little to think about.

Women try their luck; men risk theirs."

Nowadays all the married men live like bachelors, and all the bachelors like married men."

He atones for being occasionally somewhat overdressed by being always absolutely over-educated. He is a very modern type."

It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things. Names are everything.

"Love?" "An illusion." "Religion?" "The fashionable substitute for belief."

You remember the one I wore at Lady Hilstone's garden-party? You don't, but it is nice of you to pretend that you do.

We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible."

"Oh! anything becomes a pleasure if one does it too often,"

But a chance tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play—I tell you, Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.

Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.